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Monday, November 29, 2010

WikiLeaks reveals more sensitive U.S. data

AFP/Getty Images/File – WikiLeaks released 250,000 diplomatic cables to The New York Times Sunday, most from the last three years, …

The publication of the secret cables on Sunday amplified widespread global alarm about Iran's nuclear ambitions and unveiled occasional U.S. pressure tactics aimed at hot spots in Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Korea. The leaks also disclosed bluntly candid impressions from both diplomats and other world leaders about America's allies and foes.

In the wake of the massive document dump by online whistleblower WikiLeaks and numerous media reports detailing their contents, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was expected to address the diplomatic repercussions on Monday. Clinton could deal with the impact first hand after she leaves Washington on a four-nation tour of Central Asia and the Middle East — a region that figures prominently in the leaked documents.

The cables unearthed new revelations about long-simmering nuclear trouble spots, detailing U.S., Israeli and Arab world fears of Iran's growing nuclear program, American concerns about Pakistan's atomic arsenal and U.S. discussions about a united Korean peninsula as a long-term solution to North Korean aggression.

None of the disclosures appeared particularly explosive, but their publication could become problems for the officials concerned and for any secret initiatives they had preferred to keep quiet. The massive release of material intended for diplomatic eyes only is sure to ruffle feathers in foreign capitals, a certainty that already prompted U.S. diplomats to scramble in recent days to shore up relations with key allies in advance of the leaks.

At Clinton's first stop in Astana, Kazakhstan, she will be attending a summit of officials from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a diplomatic grouping that includes many officials from countries cited in the leaked cables.

The documents published by The New York Times, France's Le Monde, Britain's Guardian newspaper, German magazine Der Spiegel and others laid out the behind-the-scenes conduct of Washington's international relations, shrouded in public by platitudes, smiles and handshakes at photo sessions among senior officials.

The White House immediately condemned the release of the WikiLeaks documents, saying "such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals and people around the world who come to the United States for assistance in promoting democracy and open government."

U.S. officials may also have to mend fences after revelations that they gathered personal information on other diplomats. The leaks cited American memos encouraging U.S. diplomats at the United Nations to collect detailed data about the U.N. secretary general, his team and foreign diplomats — going beyond what is considered the normal run of information-gathering expected in diplomatic circles.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley played down the diplomatic spying allegations. "Our diplomats are just that, diplomats," he said. "They collect information that shapes our policies and actions. This is what diplomats, from our country and other countries, have done for hundreds of years."

The White House noted that "by its very nature, field reporting to Washington is candid and often incomplete information. It is not an expression of policy, nor does it always shape final policy decisions."

"Nevertheless, these cables could compromise private discussions with foreign governments and opposition leaders, and when the substance of private conversations is printed on the front pages of newspapers across the world, it can deeply impact not only U.S. foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world," the White House said.

On its website, The New York Times said "the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match."

Le Monde said it "considered that it was part of its mission to learn about these documents, to make a journalistic analysis and to make them available to its readers." Der Spiegel said that in publishing the documents its reporters and editors "weighed the public interest against the justified interest of countries in security and confidentiality."

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claimed the administration was trying to cover up alleged evidence of serious "human rights abuse and other criminal behavior" by the U.S. government. WikiLeaks posted the documents just hours after it claimed its website had been hit by a cyberattack that made the site inaccessible for much of the day.

But extracts of the more than 250,000 cables posted online by news outlets that had been given advance copies of the documents showed deep U.S. concerns about Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs along with fears about regime collapse in Pyongyang.

The Guardian said some cables showed King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia repeatedly urging the United States to attack Iran to destroy its nuclear program. The newspaper also said officials in Jordan and Bahrain have openly called for Iran's nuclear program to be stopped by any means and that leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt referred to Iran "as 'evil,' an 'existential threat' and a power that 'is going to take us to war,'" The Guardian said.

Those documents may prove the trickiest because even though the concerns of the Gulf Arab states are known, their leaders rarely offer such stark appraisals in public.

The Times highlighted documents that indicated the U.S. and South Korea were "gaming out an eventual collapse of North Korea" and discussing the prospects for a unified country if the isolated, communist North's economic troubles and political transition lead it to implode.

The Times also cited diplomatic cables describing unsuccessful U.S. efforts to prod Pakistani officials to remove highly enriched uranium from a reactor out of fear that the material could be used to make an illicit atomic device. And the newspaper cited cables that showed Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, telling Gen. David Petraeus that his country would pretend that American missile strikes against a local al-Qaida group had come from Yemen's forces.

The paper also cited documents showing the U.S. used hardline tactics to win approval from countries to accept freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay. It said Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if its president wanted to meet with President Barack Obama and said the Pacific island of Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to take in a group of detainees.

It also cited a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing that included allegations from a Chinese contact that China's Politburo directed a cyber intrusion into Google's computer systems as part of a "coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws."

Le Monde said another memo asked U.S. diplomats to collect basic contact information about U.N. officials that included Internet passwords, credit card numbers and frequent flyer numbers. They were asked to obtain fingerprints, ID photos, DNA and iris scans of people of interest to the United States, Le Monde said.

The Times said another batch of documents raised questions about Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his relationship with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. One cable said Berlusconi "appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin" in Europe, the Times reported.

Italy's Foreign Minister Franco Frattini on Sunday called the release the "Sept. 11 of world diplomacy," in that everything that had once been accepted as normal has now changed.

Der Spiegel reported that the cables portrayed German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle in unflattering terms. It said American diplomats saw Merkel as risk-averse and Westerwelle as largely powerless.

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, meanwhile, was described as erratic and in the near constant company of a Ukrainian nurse who was described in one cable as "a voluptuous blonde," according to the Times.

WikiLeaks' action was widely condemned.

Pakistan's foreign ministry said it was an "irresponsible disclosure of sensitive official documents" while Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, called the document release "unhelpful and untimely."

In Australia, Assange's home country, Attorney General Robert McClelland said law enforcement officials were investigating whether WikiLeaks broke any laws.

The State Department's top lawyer warned Assange late Saturday that lives and military operations would be put at risk if the cables were released. Legal adviser Harold Koh said WikiLeaks would be breaking the law if it went ahead. He also rejected a request from Assange to cooperate in removing sensitive details from the documents.

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Associated Press writers Anne Gearan in Washington; Juergen Baetz in Berlin; Don Melvin in London; Angela Doland in Paris; Robert H. Reid in Cairo; Brian Murphy in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Mark Lavie in Jerusalem and Nicole Winfield in Rome contributed to this report.

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Online:

http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/

Monday, November 1, 2010

US officials: Bombmaker in Yemen a key suspect

Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri
AP – This undated image released Sunday Oct. 31, 2010, by Yemen's Interior Ministry, in a combination of two …


CAIRO – He is suspected of packing explosives into the underwear of a Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner last Christmas and sent his own brother on a suicide mission against a top Saudi official.

Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, considered a key figure in al-Qaida's most active franchise, is now the chief suspect behind the mail bombs sent from Yemen and bound for the United States, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

Together with a U.S.-born preacher, Yemeni militants, and former Saudi inmates of Guantanamo, al-Asiri makes up the leadership of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

Forensic analysis indicates that al-Asiri, who is living in Yemen, built all three devices and is believed to have a fair degree of skill and training, although all the operations have been unsuccessful.

British Home Secretary Theresa May said the bomb discovered on the plane that landed in England was powerful enough to bring down the aircraft. A U.S. official and a British security consultant said the device, hidden in a printer cartridge, was sophisticated enough that it nearly slipped past British investigators even after they were tipped off.

Yemeni security officials said they are searching for al-Asiri, who is believed to be in Marib province.

His most effective operation was the attack on top Saudi counterterrorism official Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, in which he recruited his younger brother, Abdullah, to pose as a repentant militant.

Al-Asiri and his brother abruptly left their Mecca home three years ago, said their father, a four-decade veteran of the Saudi military. Aside from a brief phone call to say they had left the country, he never heard from them again.

With the bomb hidden in a body cavity, Abdullah approached the prince and blew himself up. The prince was only wounded.

All three bombs contained a high explosive known as PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, which was also used by convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid when he tried to destroy a trans-Atlantic flight in 2001.

In a September 2009 issue of Sada al-Malahem, or Voice of Battles, an Arabic-language online magazine put out by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Asiri described how he recruited his brother and they made the journey to Yemen.

He said he and his friends were originally planning to go fight the Americans in Iraq, but Saudi police raided the apartment where they were hiding and arrested them.

"They put me in prison and I began to see the depths of (the Saudis) servitude to the Crusaders and their hatred for the true worshippers of God, from the way they interrogated me," he is quoted as saying.

Abdullah, who visited him in prison, was horrified by the stories of torture and also came to believe that the government is "infidel," al-Asiri said.

Upon his release, al-Asiri tried to create a new militant cell inside Saudi Arabia but was once again discovered. Six of his colleagues were killed and he and his brother fled south to the Asir mountains where they holed up for weeks.

They entered Yemen on Aug. 1, 2006, and met with Yemeni militant Nasser al-Wahishi, who had escaped from prison just months earlier, and became the nucleus of the new al-Qaida affiliate, said the account, which could not be independently confirmed.

Al-Qaida's presence in Saudi Arabia and Yemen has been distinguished by its tenacious ability to regroup after severe setbacks, having been nearly wiped out in both countries just five years ago.

The group's battered Saudi and Yemeni branches merged in January 2009 to form al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula under the leadership of al-Wahishi, a former aide to Osama bin Laden who staged a dramatic jail break from a Yemeni prison with 22 others in 2006. In the past year, the organization has emerged as "one of the most dangerous branches of al-Qaida," according to a U.S. assessment.

Al-Wahishi's deputy, Saeed al-Shihri, is a Saudi who fought in Afghanistan and spent six years in Guantanamo Bay as inmate No. 372, before being released and going through Saudi Arabia's famous "rehabilitation" institutes. The experiences didn't prevent him from heading south to Yemen on his release.

The organization calls for the overthrow of the Saudi and Yemeni governments and has carried out a string of brazen attacks against local security forces before melting away into the rugged mountains of Yemen's inhospitable hinterlands.

It has been its attempts to take the fight to the West, however, that have attracted attention, especially through the propaganda efforts of Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

Born in New Mexico, al-Awlaki has used his website to encourage Muslims around the world to kill U.S. troops in Iraq and has been tied by U.S. intelligence to the 9/11 hijackers, underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, as well as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people in November at Fort Hood, Texas.

Al-Awlaki's growing involvement in planning operations by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula has prompted the Obama administration to place him on a target list for terrorists to be killed or captured.

All these militants were believed to be hiding in the remote and rugged mountains of Yemen's Shabwa province, helped by tribesmen disaffected with the government.

Just a day before the attempted bombing of the jet bound for Detroit last year, Yemeni warplanes raided a site where the top leadership had gathered, only missing al-Wahishi, al-Shihri and al-Awlaki by hours.

Of all of al-Qaida's affiliates, the Arabian branch has distinguished itself by its English-language outreach, mainly through al-Awlaki's writings and a new English-language online magazine.

Issues include an "Open Jihad" forum with tips for Muslims living in the West to carry out terrorist operations, such as building a bomb in the kitchen or equipping a pickup truck with metal blades to mow down pedestrians.

The last issue also included a testimonial from Samir Khan, describing how he turned against America to fight with militants in Yemen.

Although the number of hard core al-Qaida fighters in Yemen is only believed to number in the low hundreds, they are aided by sympathetic local tribes who see the central government as corrupt and oppressive.

Heavy-handed tactics by the Yemeni military have often only further inflamed tribal animosity.

Yemen is also wracked by a number of rebellions and secessionist movements, including one throughout much of the south that has provided fertile ground to al-Qaida's recruiting efforts.

The poorest country in Arab world, Yemen has 35 percent unemployment and a literacy rate of only 50 percent. It is also threatened by declining water and oil resources and an exploding population of 22 million.

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Associated Press writers Lee Keath in Cairo and Ahmed al-Haj in San'a, Yemen, contributed to this story.